Juried Shows

Today I framed two pictures that Im going to enter into the 2009 Juried Student Fine Arts Exhibition. They're two photographs from my final assignment for a photography class last semester. Im also planning to enter a juried show through myartspace.com. I entered into a juried show through myartspace last semester and want to do it again for the competition "London Calling". You post a portfolio of your work online than can contain up to 20 images and then the jurors choose the winning works, and if your work is chosen it is shipped off to London to be shown in a gallery there. I haven't yet picked out all the works I would like to enter into that competition, but I have some in mind.

Intermediate Photography Project

In intermediate photo we just got done with a project where we had to copy the work of another artist. I chose to copy one of Francis Bacon's screaming head paintings. When looking through a book of Bacon's paintings I really liked this one disturbing and nightmarish image  in black and white of a screaming man. I knew it would be a challenge to copy because I had to produce a photograph while  the work I chose was a painting and not a realistic painting what so ever. I chose my dad to be my model, thinking if I chose a friend to model they wouldn't take it as seriously since they would have to make bizarre face. I wanted to create the lines in Bacon's painting in my photograph, so when i took the pictures of my dad I had him sit on an exercise ball and bounce up and down while I shot him from the torso up using a tripod.  I was happy with the way the photos turned out but when i printed them they still needed something else to look more like the painting, so then I started experimenting with overlapping my negatives. I overlapped three negatives so that they didn't line up exactly to help create the painterly effect in Bacon's work. After doing that, the photos were looking a lot better, but I still wasn't completely satisfied, so I then decided to paint on the developer in addition to overlapping the negatives. I was really pleased with the way they ended up turning out, and although they didn't look exactly like Francis Bacon's painting I think they captured the same concept and mood.

Amy Stein

Out of the two projects Amy showed I preferred her "Domesticated" work to "Stranded". It was an interesting concept to take these stuffed animals and recreate stories of the animals' encounters with people. I liked the one photograph of the dead deer in the back of the truck with the blood coming out of its head and surrounding it on the truck bed. It reminded me of a photograph I took in high school of a deer carcass rotting on train tracks. She said something about how people think the picture is gruesome and when I showed people my photograph a lot of people thought it was disgusting, but I thought it was the coolest photograph  I had taken to date. I also liked the photo taken from behind the little girl standing with the wolf/coyote in her yard. The composition was nice and just the fact of there being little helpless girl standing there looking at this wild animal crouching and ready to run and pounce on her, I thought the scene was set set up quite well.

  I was less impressed with the "Stranded" series. i didn't really buy the whole concept of it. She started off with saying how it reflected the Bush administration and it slacking when it came time to react to during Hurricane Katrina, I just had to role my eyes. I thought it was a big stretch, and from looking at her photos you would have no idea that was her concept, they just looked like people broken down on the side of the road.  I feel if an artist has to reach that for a concept to go with their work, it shows a weakness in what they have created.

Harrison Street Cafe

I went and saw the photographs at Harrison St. Cafe one day when going to eat lunch with a friend. I always enjoy a coffee shop or restaurant displaying artwork that you can look at while you're eating. I liked a lot of the photographs and how there was a nice variety of work ranging from music photography to a close up of a cat. I thought it was nice to have a bunch of different photographers work up in one place. The only down side to the setting was that it was difficult to see all of the work up close because all the photos were hung right above tables, so you don't want to be creeping up on people while they're eating to look at the photographs. 

Paul Shambroom Lecture

      Out of all the artist lectures I've been to, I enjoyed the Paul Shambroom lecture the most. He made the lecture very enjoyable by being humorous and lively, so I didn't find myself completely bored, like I have with other artists. 

      I think I preferred his nuclear weapons photographs the most out of all his different series, probably because of the importance of the subject in todays world. His photographs were nice, but not all of them were that visually appealing, but he did say that he just took straight photographs instead of trying to enhance the image with composition. I also just prefer black and white images to color. 

I also appreciated the fact that he kept his politics out of his photography. When shooting things like nuclear weapons and subjects having to do with homeland security, it would be easy to let your opinion influence work, since you are shooting such politically charged issues. i hate it when artists get political, because it can alienate people people form your work and a lot of artists don't know what they're talking about and end up looking like idiots because of their work.  So i was glad that he made the conscious decision to leave his political opinions out of his work.

Rumors show

I just saw that when I thought I had posted this a couple of weeks ago it did not work, so here it is:

Overall I thought the show at Rumors on Saturday was okay. The atmosphere of the store was cool, but I don't know if it was the best place to hold a photography show. The other things in the store were kind of distracting. I wasn't sure what was a part of the art show or what was a part of the store and hanging up all the time, so it was a bit difficult to find the next set of photographs to look at. Each artist had their own unique way of presenting their work, which i though was cool, but some ways were more successful than others. the one exhibit where the photos were hanging from  clothes hangers was an interesting idea, but you had to keep turning the photos towards you to be able to get a good look at them. I thought the least successful presentation, was the photos on the balcony. having them them surrounded by different colored boxes was distracting and made it hard to concentrate on the photos. i think if the photographs were surrounded by less vibrant colored boxes, it would've been better. i enjoyed the photographs lit up by the light boxes and displayed behind the windowpanes the best. the way they were presented was creative, and by having the light boxes, it really came across as though you were looking in on someone by the picture was illuminated.

First Fridays

        Going to First Fridays on the 6th was my first time attending a First Fridays in Richmond. I used to attend First Fridays a lot in Charlottesville with my dad, but that has started to die out since a lot of galleries are shutting down there. In Charlottesville, even when all the galleries were open, there were only about 6 to check out and there would be a couple that would always show crappy work every month. It was nice to see so many galleries still open here and so many people in attendance. After going, I called my dad to tell him he should come down to Richmond for a First Fridays here, since it was way more worth it to go and look at the art than in Charlottesville.

My favorite gallery for the night was the first one I stopped at, Artisan Alley. There were multiple artists featured in the show, some I liked more than others. I really enjoyed the charcoal drawings in the back of the gallery, but wasn't able to find the name of the artist anywhere. They were just black charcoal on white paper of flowing lines and curves, but as you looked closer you could spot and eye or mouth or human figure. I thought they were really well done the way the drawings filled up the whole paper and the curvaceous lines created really nice eye flow throughout the drawings.

I also enjoyed the paintings done by Michael Keeling. While I was looking at one of his paintings, he actually approached my roommate and I and talked to us for a long while about his work. He came up to us and asked us "So what do you see in this painting?" and we weren't quite sure what to say since it wasn't an image of any real object, but a large canvas of different lines and strokes painted in bright colors. he continued tell us that he asked us that because he says different age groups see different things when he asks them. Such as an older person sees something different in his art, than a child who says they see a smiley face. And he really enjoys that, because he wants people to see different thing in his art, and said he doesn't know what the hell he's doing, but just wants to have fun. I really liked that he said that, because I enjoy art where there isn't an obvious idea trying to be presented that artist wants to get across. And I also liked how he didn't take himself too seriously and that his paintings are him trying to have fun.

Above is a picture of my roommate and i at First Fridays that appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch the next day.